By now you have to have at least heard of spyware the virus infecting computers all over the world. You are also probably freaked out about being on the internet at all for fear that you to will fall prey to this nasty cyber bug. You also probably have no idea what you are dealing with.
Or maybe (and this is more common than you would think) you are infected with a spyware virus but you just don't know it. You are wondering why your computer has started to act up, runs real slow, and randomly freezes or shuts off. Well you are not alone but you are VERY vulnerable! The worst situation is the one that you are not prepared for, just like the worst enemy is the one that you don't know much about.

So i want to give you a 5 minute tutorial on spyware so that you will have at least a fighting chance.
First you should know that spyware is just what it claims to be, software that spies. What is it spying? Well just about any type of information that is on your computer. This could be as tame as the love letters stored in an email folder to your searching habits on the internet to Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, dates of birth, you name it. So not only is your computer messed up but there is the potential that your life is messed up too!
So how does it infect? Well it gets on your computer via the internet of course.

But you have to download something that contains the code in order for it to work. Once the virus has gained access to your hard drive it searches through all of the files looking for valuable information. It then transmits this information to the creator of the spyware.
So just never download anything right? Well its more complicated than that. You see in this day and age computers are much more user friendly with many different automations. Often computers will automatically download plugins and the like in order to properly view a web page for instance. So spyware could gain entrance this way. Or programmers of these viruses often will disguise the download to look like something else so that you inadvertently download. Basically its bad and its programmers are smart. The bottom line is that you need anti spyware software to recognize these tricks and help you avoid these terrible mistakes.